Music, Books and Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Exton: A Context for Handel's ‘Comus’

This book outlines the cultural context in which a version of Milton’s Comus, with music by Handel, came to be staged in the 1740s at Exton Hall, Rutland, in the East Midlands of England. The book explores the cultural interests of an eighteenth-century English peer (the 4th Earl of Gainsborough) who believed in the value of the arts – including performance – in the education and development of children and young people. The book is based on archival documents, transcribed in an appendix, that relate to the purchase of books and the domestic performance of music and plays in a mid-eighteenth-century English country house. The documents in the appendix provide detailed information on the price of goods and materials (e.g. paper, books and music, violin bows and strings, hats, fabrics, whale bone and thread) and on the cost of labour (e.g., music lessons, repairs to instruments, concert fees, music copying and binding, carpentry, scene painting and costume making) in mid-eighteenth-century England. This book completes a tetralogy of publications by the author on Comus and Exton, the earlier elements being an edition of the masque (2016), a discussion of Lord Gainsborough’s purchase of a bust of Handel (2021) and a study of the verbal and musical text of the entertainment (2022).